WE MARCH FOR THE MOUNTAINS 197 
her companions in the foreground, while off on the 
neighboring hillside three distinct groups of ele¬ 
phants were in view. The latter were thoroughly 
alarmed and moved away very swiftly for some 
distance and then came to a pause. The big cow 
and her attendants then moved off, feeling that the 
retreat had been successfully effected. Once more 
we followed them and came up to them, and then 
once more we were flanked by a number of ele¬ 
phants that had previously disappeared over the 
hill. They had swung around and were returning 
directly toward where we stood, unsuspecting. 
We barely had time to fall back to some small 
bushes, where we waited while the flanking party 
approached. They came almost toward us, and 
when only about fifty feet away I ventured a photo¬ 
graph, feeling that, if successful, it would be the 
closest picture ever made of a herd of wild ele¬ 
phants. I used a Yerascope, a small stereoscopic 
French machine whose “click” is almost noiseless. 
The elephants advanced and we huddled together 
with rifles ready in the patch of bushes. It seemed 
a certainty that they would charge, and that if our 
bullets could not turn them we would be completely 
annihilated. But as yet there was no sign that they 
saw us, or, if they did, they could not distinguish 
our motionless forms from the foliage of the scrub. 
At last, the foremost elephant, barely thirty feet 
from us, came to the trail in the grass by which we 
had retreated when we first saw them. The trunk, 
sweeping ahead of it as if feeling for the scent of 
